Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment the Government has made of the impact of increasing the child element of universal credit on reducing child poverty.
It is not possible to produce a robust estimate of the impact of increasing the child element of universal credit on child poverty. Projecting the impacts of policies on poverty involves projecting forward the impact of the pandemic on every household’s income which is not possible to do with confidence, not least because the latest comprehensive data on net incomes for households is from 2019-20, before the pandemic began.